Tag: Inner Source

The house magazine of IAV Automotive Engineering GmbH, a major supplier to the German automotive industry, which had interviewed Markus Blonn and me about open source and inner source at IAV, translated the magazine article into English, woohoo!

Yesterday, I discussed what makes a good pilot project in inner source. The main thrust of the suggestion was not to start with a big bang but rather to choose a relevant but not too large project. This begs the question of complexity of projects, specifically viewed from an inner source perspective. How should you escalate and grow your ambition for inner source projects? I see a 1 + 3 structure of levels.

I received several requests recently for my inner source charter document to provide it in DOC format, after I thought this work had fallen dormant (or perhaps the PDF version was sufficient). So I wanted to add my thoughts on how to take first steps in inner source, in particular in the selection of a pilot project.

The house magazine of IAV Automotive Engineering GmbH, a major supplier to the German automotive industry, interviewed Markus Blonn and me about open source and inner source at IAV (in German). We had a good time as you can see 😉

Abstract

Inner sourcing is the use of open source best practices within companies to improve engineering productivity. In 2006, I introduced inner source to SAP. After becoming a professor, my group helped further companies introduce inner source to their engineering organizations. Using three generations of projects, we report about our experiences and how we are turning those into a practical handbook for inner source governance.Continue reading “Upcoming Talk on Ten Years of Inner Source Case Studies at UC Santa Cruz”

I was recently asked why I argue against company-internal marketplaces for software components yet emphasize the need for pricing components that cross company boundaries within the same holding company (also known as transfer pricing). The answer is simple: Setting up an internal marketplace is a managerial choice and pricing the movement of code (IP) across company boundaries is a taxable event that you need to deal with: It is not a choice.

Agile methods reacquainted developers with the idea of working from business value rather than focusing on technical concerns only. Agile methods are therefore often equated with feature-driven development, in which work is driven by features prioritized by business value irrespective of technical consequences. This thinking can create code silos and wreak havoc on software architecture and component quality. Developer complaints are legion, in particular for never getting the time to fix things or do them right in the first place.

I just listened to Eberhard Wolff’sBED-Con talk on microservice-based system architectures, which he prefers to call Independent Systems Architectures (ISA). One purpose of calling it ISA is to emphasize that there should be no common data model and no shared reusable libraries between microservices. Obviously, by discounting reuse, ISA may increase development speed short-term while increasing cost and quality problems long-term. Eventually, in his talk, Wolff came around and argued that microservce implementation independence and reuse are a trade-off rather than an either-or decision.